Memory, Trauma and Affect: The Implicated Subject in Anuk Arudpragasam's A Passage North (original) (raw)
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Trauma, Memory and Identity Crisis: Reimagining and Rewriting the Past
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing , 2022
By dealing with various traumatic events, this volume shows the impact of trauma on the victims’ memory and identity on both individual and collective levels. Bringing together scholars from varying social, cultural, ethnic and political backgrounds, it foregrounds the suffering of the marginalised, thus giving them a narrative, a voice. The book shows the way in which the victims of trauma confront the past, instead of running away from it, share their stories with others, and thus (re)assert their shattered identity. It also highlights the way in which (trauma) narratives can enable the traumatised to challenge official history and to come up with an alternative version of it. Put another way, trauma narratives provide the victims and survivors the opportunity to reimagine, to reinvent and to rewrite the past in order to secure a peaceful future, and help them find a place in history.
Tormented Memories: Th e Individual and the Collective
Tormented Memories: Th e Individual and the Collective This article sets out to probe the public debate that evolved in Israel over the dedication of a forest to the memory of King Boris III of Bulgaria. It will also address the image of Bulgaria in Israel's collective memory in relation to the rescue of Bulgarian Jews and to the deportation of the Macedonian and Th racian Jews to the death camps. Th is particular case study sheds light on the ways by which individuals and subgroups attempt to shape the Holocaust's historical consciousness. Th is eff ort is a consequence of contested memories of experiences during the Second World War, which furthermore demonstrates the existing tensions between individual memory and the construction of collective memory.¹ More importantly, it also reveals how subgroups form their identity and how they present themselves in the national arena, where the construction of collective memory is negotiated and shaped.
Crossing Boundaries: Memory and Trauma
Studies in American Jewish Literature, 2010
Simon Schama wrote, in Landscape and Memory, that he learned from his teacher how history is not to be found only in the text but through the archives of the feet (24). In my eleven lengthy journeys throughout Lithuania beginning in 1993, 1 was, like many others, searching out my Jewish roots in a country that I never imagined I would visit. But my American feet took me back into the villages once inhabited by my family. And to the very places of massacre where their lives came to an end. At first it seemed only in the compressed silence of poetry could such experience find its language. Or in testimony of survivors, despite the view of some historians about the unreliability of testimony. I began to realize that it was this very unreliability that contained what was to be learned, the variations in the descriptions of specific traumatic incidents. And I discovered that an image from my childhood that I had not understoodthe sight of my mother and father sitting in stunned silence on the stairway between the first floor of the house and the secondtook on new meaning as I wandered in the forests and villages of this place where our family had lived for so many centuries and where the stories of childhood had taken root. For this was the moment, in 1941, when a letter arrived with a plea for help, but by the time the letter was in their hands, it was already too late. Sixteen years have passed since I first walked in Lithuania. I was privileged to know those survivors, rescuers, and witnesses who talked with me and became my friends. After the war, the writer Chaim Grade returned to the Vilna Ghetto: "I go home, and gliding behind me comes the ghetto, with all its broken windows, like blind people groping their way along the walls" (429). He imagines that the dead have come back to study their books and scrolls, for he finds scattered pages from sacred books. "Perhaps the tears that drenched the Techinas will live again for me, perhaps my own boyhood face will shine out as so many years past, and I will be ♦ SAJL 102 Volume 29 (2010) ♦
Psicología Política, 2006
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